Context Navigation

PostGIS Raster Home Page

August 27, 2012FME 2013 will soon read and write rasters stored in PostGIS!Safe Software will write a reader, a writer and some others functionalities to interact with rasters stored in PostGIS! These tools should be released with FME 2013 and already available in future beta versions of FME this fall. A great news for the PostGIS community!

On the GDAL side, lots of improvement have been recently done on the PostGIS Raster driver. You can now read irregular arrangements of raster and translate them into any format supported by GDAL. We are still looking for sponsors to implement the writer part of the driver.

July 24, 2012PostGIS Raster Released with PostGIS 2.0 and another GSoC!Lot's of things happened since the last news was published in this page. First of all PostGIS Raster is now part of PostGIS 2.0! Congratulation to everybody who worked (and still work) on the raster stuff: Bborie, Jorge, Regina, David, Mateusz, Sandro & Pierre! Second: A second Google summer of Code project has been accepted for PostGIS (the first was for the GDAL driver and hence for the GDAL project actually). Qing Liu will work on a distance raster to feature function and a cost distance function if she gets time. Welcome Qing!

March 24, 2011A great Code Sprint and... ...a new contributor!David Zwarg from Azavea and Pierre Racine from the CFR met for the first time at the Montréal Code Sprint last week. They came out with a very innovative MapAlgebra function based on a user defined PL/pgSQL function. This code should be committed soon with another version involving neighbour pixels. On another side, students are already showing interest for our Google Summer of Code Ideas and Bborie Park, an experienced programmer from the Center for Vectorborne Diseases at the University of California will join the team. He will work on a series of SQL function converting PostGIS rasters to the different formats supported by GDAL and on resampling. Welcome Bborie!

February 14, 2011Two plugins to display PostGIS rasters!Thanks to Maurício de Paulo, there is now a plugin to display PostGIS rasters in QGIS. Look for "wktraster" in the QGIS plugin page and Mauricio's article (if you can decrypt portuguese!). Samething on the side of gvSIG, the popular spanish open source GIS! Nacho Brodin has developed a plugin to display raster stored in PostGIS. See the page of the project. On our side, we are working fixing bugs and implementing ST_MapAlgebra. See you at the Code Sprint 2011 in Montréal (march 15-18)!

September 15, 2010WKT Raster becomes THE new PostGIS raster type!It's official! The WKT Raster extension will become the new PostGIS RASTER type in PostGIS 2.0 planned for next april. The PostGIS and the WKT Raster team met at the FOSS4G friday's code sprint and decided that WKT Raster was mature enough to bring interesting new functionalities to PostGIS. A new MapAlgebra function should be added for this release. Congratulation to the whole team for all the work accomplished!

June 11, 2010A tutorial and a book!The PostGIS in Action chapter on PostGIS WKT Raster is out! Thanks to Regina Obe and Leo Hsu, there is already a good amount of literature on WKT Raster and this makes WKT Raster to be a little bit more in the PostGIS family. Pierre Racine has also written a tutorial on how to import and intersect a huge raster coverage with a vector coverage. Your raster coverage is huge and you can't work with it in your favorite GIS platform? Read the tutorial! You will be amazed by the simplicity and the speed of the intersection functions. Good reading!

February 22, 2010A third company join the WKT Raster team!The award-winning GIS software development firm, Azavea, specializing in web-based geographic analysis, visualization and modeling applications, decided to invest in WKT Raster development. The company sent David Zwarg and Jeff Adams to the Code Sprint 2010 in NY. Jeff worked on PostGIS and David helped with many WKT Raster base functions. David committed himself to work on many other WKT Raster functions in the near future. His main task will be to design and implement the ST_MapAlgebra() and the ST_Resample() functions. Welcome David!

December 10, 2009Tyler Erickson speaks about his need for PostGIS WKT Raster at FOSS4G 2009Tyler Erickson, Research Scientist at the Michigan Tech Research Institute presented his research project at FOSS4G 2009 in Sydney, Australia. Tyler uses GeoDjango and PostGIS to visualise the results of CO2 simulation models directly in Google Earth. WKT Raster would enable him to easily do raster/vecter spatial analysis from his web application. Tyler's project was selected as one of the professional winners in Google’s 2009 KML in Research Competition.

December 4, 2009Jorge Arevalo full time on WKT Raster!Jorge Arevalo who developped the first version of the GDAL WKT Raster driver during the summer of 2009 will be working for at least one year on WKT Raster. Jorge is working for DEIMOS Space, a Spanish aerospace company leading the Espana virtual project. Jorge's superior, Miguel Lizondo, confirmed that Jorge would be devoting most of his time to WKT Raster in the coming year. This commitment should normally be extended for a second year afterward.

Jorge will follow the planned roadmap and will be the main developper for the coming year. Mateuzs Loskot will continue contribute his spare time to the project and Pierre Racine will help Jorge with the specifications and the general management of the project.

PostGIS Raster is an ongoing project aiming at developing raster support in PostGIS. It is a new project very different from the previous PGRaster project and also very different from ​Oracle Spatial GeoRaster.

The goal of PostGIS Raster is to implement the RASTER type as much as possible like the GEOMETRY type is implemented in PostGIS and to offer a single set of overlay SQL functions (like ST_Intersects) operating seamlessly on vector and raster coverages.

PostGIS Raster is now part of PostGIS starting with version 2.0 (spring 2012)!

PostGIS Raster Google Summer of Code 2012 Ideas

This year again every projects submitted by OSGeo to the Google Summer of Code will be financed by Google. This means 5000 USD$ for a programming student summer job! See our project list or propose your own one! Every details ​here and ​here. Deadline to apply: April 8.

Installation

Windows Binaries - If you are running PostGIS on Windows, you can find fairly recent binaries of PostGIS 2.0 (including raster support) in the ​Windows Experimental Builds section. These are for PostgreSQL 8.4, 9.0, and upcoming 9.1. Note that development on the standalone wktraster project deployable on PostGIS 1.3-1.5 has stopped and all future versions and bug fixes of raster support will be packaged in the PostGIS 2.0 builds. The last set of binaries for the wktraster stand-alone are also available on Windows experimental page for PostgreSQL 8.3,8.4,9.0 running for PostGIS 1.4-1.5.

Mac OSX Binaries - If you are running PostGIS on Mac OSX leopard or Snow Leopard, you can find fairly recent binaries of PostGIS at ​KyngChaos PostgreSQL GIS.

ArcGIS 10 - Same idea as with OpenJump: You can not display rasters directly but a vectorization of them. See ​What is a query layer? in the ArcGIS 10 documentation. With ArcGIS you don't have to convert the geometries to WKB with ST_AsBinary().

More Info

PostGIS Raster has been designed following a thorough analysis of the numerous discussions about raster integration in PostGIS over the recent years. You can find most of the post to the PostGIS-users group related to raster integration in this page.

for efficient overlay analysis operations between vector and raster layers...

...or OUTSIDE the database (as JPEG or TIFF)...

so desktop and web applications can quickly access and load raster tiles and nevertheless benefits from the powerful PostGIS GiST spatial index. Every PostGIS Raster SQL functions working with in-db raster tiles work seamlessly with out-db raster tiles.

...introduces the concept of raster objects...

geographic features are stored as variable size raster tiles instead of polygons.

allows vector to raster conversion without lost of information.

...is much more simple than PGRaster and Oracle GeoRaster! PostGIS Raster supports...

only one type (instead of two in Oracle Spatial: SDO_GEORASTER & SDO_RASTER). In PostGIS Raster there are no differences between rasters and tiles: a tile is a raster and a raster is a tile. i.e. one row = one tile = one raster; one table = one raster coverage.

no metadata (like PostGIS)

no masks (you can create a mask as a band)

no multiple dimensions (only two: x, y). Not to be confused with bands; PostGIS Raster DO supports multiband raster...

no pyramids (reduced resolution coverages can be stored as a separate layer)

What do people think about PostGIS Raster?

This proposal is better than any I have seen, addresses solving problems that if solved will provide actual new functionality and benefit to users, and clearly you've thought this through over some time